Before you become a professional data jerk (like myself) people tell you 80% of the job is data scraping, cleaning, organizing, piping etc. And the last 20% is the analysis and stats (or predictive whosiwhatsits). They're lying. Its 85% cleaning, organizing etc, 5% doing "real" stats and 10% convincing people you're not lying. This site seems to nicely outline many of the tasks that fall outside of the "fun" 5%.